1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image processing system, a device and a method for image pickup, a recording medium, and a program, and particularly to an image processing system, a device and a method for image pickup, a recording medium, and a program that make it possible to transfer a large amount of image data to another apparatus efficiently.
2. Background Art
Recently, with the spread of digital still cameras, the functionality of digital still cameras has been expanded by, for example, providing a communication function to digital still cameras in addition to an original image pickup function and a recording function, and thus uses of picked-up image data have been expanded.
For example, a digital still camera is devised which has a communication function, and leaves a reduced image when transmitting a main image recorded on a recording medium to another communication apparatus so that a user can easily refer to the transferred image. (See, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-(pages 6 to 10, and FIG. 2 and FIG. 3).)
Such a digital still camera enables effective use of storage capacity of the recording medium provided in the digital still camera because image data is supplied to another communication apparatus and stored in the communication apparatus, and also facilitates reference of transferred images on the digital still camera side.
However, in the above-described method, when image data obtained by picking up an image is transferred to another communication apparatus to be used by a side of the other communication apparatus, a user of the other communication apparatus cannot refer to the image until the transfer of the image data is completed.
Recent digital still cameras have higher functionality and also have an expanded storage area of a recording medium for recording image data obtained by image pickup, so that the digital still cameras can store a large amount of image data. Thus, for example, when all of the large amount of image data is to be transferred, a great amount of processing time, which increases as the free space of the recording medium is reduced, is required.
In many cases, however, the communication apparatus side to which the large amount of image data is thus transferred actually uses a part of the image data to process and print images.
When a digital still camera is used in business as, for example, by a newspaper publishing company, in particular, only a small number of images are selected for actual use with an article or the like from a large amount of images obtained by image pickup, and most of the images are discarded.
In such a case, it is desirable to be able to use images obtained by image pickup immediately. With the above-described method, however, the images cannot be referred to until transfer of a large amount of image data is completed, so that the efficiency of business can be decreased.
On the other hand, a method of reducing an amount of data to be transferred by selecting images to be transferred on a digital still camera side is conceivable. This, however, involves a complicated operation by a user of the digital still camera, thus rendering the image pickup operation inefficient.